Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘I never particularly liked the people in the pews,’ corrected her father. ‘A habit I am sad to say I passed down to you, living more for your books than for those who might have shared your life with you. The church’s beliefs I did not have a problem with. I was always rather fond of the fourth koan: “When you hurt another creature you hurt yourself.” It always seemed we never paid enough attention to that one.’

‘I never dream of you. Some mornings I can wake up and I can’t even remember what you looked like. Please stay with me,’ Amelia implored.

‘In a way I will and in a way I will not,’ said her father. ‘Even an echo must end. You are afraid to wake for fear of the trials that await you, but you should not be. You must free your mind and burn your beliefs.’

‘But Camlantis,’ said Amelia. ‘I’m trapped, so damned useless here. Camlantis is so very close now and the dream …’

‘… Is closer than you know,’ said her father. ‘All flesh is a prison and your desires are its bars. Dreams, desires, the burdens of the flesh, they all seem so distant to me now. Just remember that the dream you chase is not the dream you find.’

‘What will I find, father? What will I find in the land where Camlantis once lay?’

‘A hole filled with a lake. Life always gives you what you need, but never what you want. I think you might find the truth.’

‘My truth or yours?’ Amelia asked.

‘Now that’s my girl talking,’ said her father. ‘The one who knows that nothing can be achieved sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.’ He walked out of the library, his shape becoming fainter with each step. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, before I go?’

‘Do you ever see mamma?’

‘You know, I find her every damned where I look,’ said her father, his voice as much an echo now as the pattern of his soul. ‘In the rustle of the trees and the song of decaying carbon, in the sway of a newborn colt and the froth on a jar of beer. But mostly I find her in you.’

He was gone.

‘Well, that’s reassuring, given that she bloody died in childbirth.’

Her next dream slipped into her mind, but she was not to remember it.

Amelia was starting to think the Daggish had forgotten about her. Left her in the u-boat’s storage room to starve, although that might have been a blessing, given the food they had been bringing her once a day up until then. Long green bricks that resembled compressed, dried peas, but tasted more like zinc, full of crunchy pip-like things. Even washed down with cold water it tasted no better. No doubt designed to be perfectly balanced to meet the bodily functions of the Daggish army of organic slaves, it only underlined their alien nature.

She used a paste made from the food to count a line of days across her metal walls, each long smear another wasted day in captivity. The motion of the Sprite had ceased a couple of days ago — she had marked that day with a cross. If they were waiting in an attempt to wear down her nerves, it was working. Each hour all she could think about was the living death that was existence for those absorbed by the green-mesh. The pitiable freed slaves of the Daggish being sold off in the comfort auction back at the trading post. And they, supposedly, were the lucky ones, recaptured by their own people. What would it be like to have all individuality and personality subsumed to the dictates of the super-organism that dwelled in the heart of the jungle? Were the slaves aware of what they once were? Was there a small seed of humanity watching out through Daggish eyes after you were made part of the hive? A feverish dream you could never wake from.

Finally the Daggish came for Amelia, dragging the bloody body of Bull Kammerlan, his stolen captain’s uniform — inexpertly re-tailored from a fit for the commodore’s frame — now ripped and pierced by his captors’ spines. Amelia had just enough time to take in the scene when the guards reached for her and pulled her out into the corridor.

Bull coughed and shook his head in sadness when he saw the identity of his fellow prisoner. ‘You think I’ve taken a kicking, you should see the other guy.’

‘Where’s the rest of your crew, Kammerlan?’

The silent guards showed no sign of recognizing that their prisoners were communicating, let alone objecting to it.

‘Beats me, girl. They had me locked up on my own. At one point they threw in one of the Catosians — a centurion, a real hellcat. That lasted an hour, until they grew tired of us both trying to kill each other. Then they took her away and I’ve been on my own ever since.’

More Daggish appeared, carrying weapons that resembled a Jackelian uplander’s sack-pipes, except that the uplanders’ musical instruments did not squirt fire that stuck like treacle to the flesh. The new guards marched in front of Bull and Amelia.

‘Rank,’ said Amelia. ‘They’ve separated us by rank. You were the u-boat skipper when they took the Sprite . I’m the expedition head — the centurion was the senior officer of marines after Veryann. Ironflanks said the Daggish had different castes, like insects.’

‘All I’ve seen are these cactus-skinned bruisers and a few animals dripping in that filthy green moss,’ said Bull. He turned to the Daggish soldiers. ‘Where’re my people, you bark-faced bastards? What have you done with my crew?’

The guards showed no response to his words.

‘They can’t talk,’ said Amelia. ‘Only that clicking noise.’

‘I’ve heard enough of that to last me a lifetime. Like crickets in the meadow, chattering at each other during the night. What a bloody waste. I could have been rich. Quest would have coughed up half the silver in his counting house for what we could have salvaged from the lake bed.’

Amelia didn’t point out that Kammerlan’s dreams of riches were as far away as her chances of discovering where Camlantis drifted in the heavens. With a clang, one of the forward hatches was flung open and Amelia found herself blinking in the bright sunlight. As her eyes adjusted, she saw they were moored on the shores of what looked like a sea. No, not a sea. She could just make out the green-covered mountains rising above the opposite shore. Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. Behind her squatted the Daggish nest city, flute-shaped towers given life and allowed to breed to the plans of a madman, sweeps and angles that no architect from Jackals was capable of mimicking, and everything overgrown — or perhaps intermingled — with lush emerald vegetation.

But it was not the bizarre city that caught Amelia’s eye; it was the range of mountains behind the jungle and the ruins that lay between two of the peaks she was gawping at. ‘Do you see that? No wonder …’

Bull followed her gaze but saw nothing of note. ‘What is it?’

‘Look, between the two peaks of the mountains. Those are the remains of a wall. Haven’t you seen something similar to that before?’

‘It’s manmade?’ Bull said in wonder. ‘Nobody can build a wall that large.’

‘That’s what people say about the dyke wall at Hundred Locks back in Jackals. A freak of geology, smoothed by ancient storms to resemble an artefact of the race of the man. Look at its design, it’s the same!’

‘There’s no water to hold back here,’ said Bull.

‘Not now, but thousands of years ago, before the skin of the earth had turned, there would have been water. The Camlanteans were mariners, explorers. Their country wouldn’t have been landlocked under this green hell.’

The Daggish escort pushed them across a boarding ramp and onto a pier that might have been formed from the hardened secretions of a giant snail.

‘Well, this cursed place is under new management now,’ said Bull.